


trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in

by nocrimeinthearchive



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Everything is made up and the points don't matter, F/F, absolutely no characterisation, completely unfinished
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:34:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23018623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nocrimeinthearchive/pseuds/nocrimeinthearchive
Summary: a girl, a car; a another girl, a window; a come-to-jesus moment in a bedroom in which faith had not hitherto been a steady visitor. a sketch of an idea that's been yellowing in a drawer for several years, shared in case anyone else wants it or in the hope it will make your spare couple of minutes pass more enjoyably.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Kudos: 2





	trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in

**Author's Note:**

> i know there's something big waiting in a captain america story set in the AU where all of bruce springsteen's songs happen, but it'll take more than what i've got to make it happen. 
> 
> this has been sitting on my hard drive for literal years in this exact state. i know the bones of what it was and what i wanted to do with it, but i also know i'm not going to do that now. so here's a sketch of the very start, part of the opening, and the actual catalysing moment for that story.

There’s a crack in the thin cotton curtains on a second-storey window overlooking Baltic Avenue, and in the line of frail yellow light peeking through, the silhouette of an eager audience watches the cars rumble into the gas station across the street.

In the summer this is a nightly performance, the thick air roiling gently to the sound of idling engines, but in the winter they only come out maybe once a week or less. 

The number of machines shifts – never less than three, never more than seven – and every time it’s the same: from up north, taking the blocks in a languid parade, they come down here to fill up before they take the highway run straight out west. 

They know they have an audience – or, rather, they see themselves as generating an audience, a fine group of young lions prowling through the night, shining under streetlights and yelling between cars when they think of something to say. This is the main show, for them, and therefore for blocks around there should be eyes and ears on nothing else.

Mostly, though, the houses beside which their cars rumble and roll simply turn up the volume on the television or the radio, pull the curtains closer together and wait for this latest chapter of the same, decades-old story to pass along. 

There is one dedicated viewer, and she spends her nights in a small bedroom on the second floor of a clapboard fixer-upper, anxiously waiting every night to hear the echo of their engines.

Her name is Jane. It could be Mary, or Wendy, or anything else if she was asked by the right person, but for now it is Jane, and for now she lies belly-down on her bowing mattress watching avidly as the cars roll in under the fluorescent lights of the gas station.

Tonight there are four cars. The make of most of them doesn’t matter, although anyone in the cars could describe to you every inch of their pride and joy; for now, for Jane’s purposes, they are simply The Gang, and they are in Their Cars.

The only car which actually matters – to her and therefore to anyone, really – is the Camaro. This Camaro has been studied studiously and watched watchfully for nigh on six months now, since the stinking hot July night on which it first rolled into Jane’s life. 

The Camaro is powder blue, although sometimes it could be a sky blue, and it has a sulky growl if it’s left to its own devices for too long, and its chrome trim is like a beacon that calls Jane home.

Its driver – the Girl – is another question altogether. This question must be taken in shifts, and has been, dutifully, night after night, with Jane addressing each part in dedicated analysis until finally she has developed a complete picture of the beast with whom she is dealing.

Jane did not start with the head, or the feet. She started, on that steaming summer night as her curtains were just barely shifting in the thin evening breeze, with the arms. 

It is difficult to for Jane to imagine how powerful those arms are. 

She has imagined, at times, that they are arms that could tame a colt at full tilt, in the middle of a cloud of dust with every strain pulsing under the skin.

At other times, she has decided that they are arms that could build a house on their own. She has imagined them stacked with bricks, heaving a saw through sleepers, hauling a wheelbarrow across a construction site amid the roar of tools under a baking sun.

What she does know – and this is what began her measured inspection of the whole creature, this is what prompted the Event and (it seems to her) all subsequent moments in her life – is that those arms can, without hesitation, jack up a car and loosen each nut and tug off a flat and heft up a spare and wrench each nut back on and store the flat and lower the car without any visible effort.

In a bedroom in which faith had not been a steady visitor, those arms, seen in the half-light under a sheen of sweat, were a come-to-Jesus moment. They were religious sculpture: marble rippling with a blind love for the human form and the divine made flesh; a sign that God was real, and that God wanted humans to be happy. 

Jane was not sure if she was happy – but she had been converted nonetheless.

Now Jane lies on her bed and watches The Gang roll in. 

From the crack in the curtains she can feel the cold outside seeping through, the biting chill muted and softened as it washes onto her face through the glass. In the already-cold room, her aunt and uncle’s weak heating powerless against the January night, it makes her shiver. 

Jane physically compresses herself as best she can, bringing her shoulders in and scrunching up her stomach, but she keeps her face glued to the window.

* * *

There is something in the mailbox, a piece of paper folded over and left jutting out of the slot. 

Jane stops. 

For a moment, she feels as though she has become a photograph. On the street beside her, cars roll past ensconced in their own time, but the seconds leave Jane alone as they pass. The sound has drained out of the world and there is a rushing roar in her ears.

Jane takes the paper respectfully, preserving the fold with her fingertips until the paper’s ends rustle in the breeze and she pinches it shut in her panic.

Now, with two hands, she opens it.

The message on it is handwritten, each letter printed flat and wide.

‘Come out tonight’.

* * *

Jane feels the weight of her crucifix against her breastbone. It knocks against her chest with every step, heavier and heavier on every hit, and as she mounts the kerb she could swear that if she took off her dress she’d be bruised black and blue.

She realises, belatedly, that her dress is too light – the moment she stepped onto her front porch every hair on her body reared up, but it has taken her this long to feel it, and now her teeth start chattering as she crosses the pavement. 

The Camaro gleams under the sharp light of the gas station. Behind her, the full width of the street yawns cavernously between her and her house. 

This is the closest she has ever been to the car. Between her imagination and the physical world it seems to have grown twice as large – Jane thinks she could be laid down across the back seat, arms above her head and legs outstretched, and still not touch the doors; someone could prop her up on the bonnet like a hood ornament and her feet wouldn’t touch the ground.

Inside the car, the Girl is waiting. If the car has doubled in size then the girl has grown with it, because it sits perfectly around her like a tailored jacket – her natural habitat, thinks Jane, as she takes the final steps and stands awkwardly in front of the opened passenger door.

Her crucifix must’ve grown, too, Jane realises with a start. She feels that anybody could look at her chest and see the outline of the Martyr pressing through the cotton. 

At any moment she expects to the girl to look down at her dress stretched tight across His anguished face. The Girl in the driver’s seat inspects her, and Jane waits for the moment to come and for that to be the ballgame, for her to be laughed back across the street, for this dumb little experiment to finally end and be exposed as the joke that it is.

Instead, the girl's smile erupts into a grin, and she leans across and smacks the seat with an exaggerated swing and says, 

‘What’re you waiting for? Hop in.’


End file.
